ABSTRACT
Mobility across international borders as well as state attempts to curtail this are facts of life for women such as Seena, Suja, Mariyam and Hussaiba 1 who have worked for up to twenty years as foreign domestic workers in the Gulf. 2 They are part and parcel of the large number of impoverished women from Kerala who leave their native lands and arrive in Dubai. Some had first worked elsewhere – Hussaiba in Saudi Arabia, Seena in Oman, and Mariyam in Oman, Bahrain and Ajman (another Emirate) – but at a certain moment they all had come to Dubai, where they joined the large contingent of foreign women who engage in domestic work. After some years of work, they would return to Kerala, but quite often they would then come to work in Dubai again. In the course of these multiple migrations, these foreign domestic workers have engaged at various moments in acts and activities that state agents would define as illegal. They leave India without a clearance, reside in the UAE with non-work visas, overstay their visa or abscond and then often have to make do without a passport and a residence permit. They engage with a network of agents in order to get duplicate passports and other fake documents. In some cases, they do so because they have no other options, yet some also go through illegal channels because they consider it easier and quicker than when they would go through state bureaucracies. 3
